Authors: Nevada Barr
Heath reached over and pulled the iPod out of the speaker. Silence bloomed like a blessing, broken only by the drip, drip, drip of slow tears. Pressing a button on her wrist, she activated the metal bones. With a hum like that of an electric window in an older-model Cadillac, they eased her down onto the seat of the commode. She moved her crutches so they wouldn’t be between her and her daughter.
“Honey…,” she said gently, and held out her hand. Elizabeth laid the razor carefully in her palm. Heath set it on the sink counter.
Elizabeth had been contemplating suicide with the layered blades of a Lady Schick. At best, she could have given herself what amounted to nasty paper cuts. Though she was in a hot bath, as the media always portrayed suicides for some reason, Elizabeth, being a modest girl by nature and upbringing, was wearing the iridescent blue one-piece bathing suit she wore for swim races.
Much to laugh at.
Nothing funny.
For a minute neither spoke. Elizabeth, flushed with heat, eyes and mouth swollen from crying, long dark hair sleek as a seal’s pelt on her shoulders, looked so small and young.
A lump hard and hot as a burning coal formed in Heath’s throat. “What can I do?” she managed, her voice burned and choking. “What can I say? Who can I kill? For you, Elizabeth, I will do it. Whatever you need, I will do it.”
Denise sipped her Coke, flat and warm from neglect. Just like me, she thought sourly, then reminded herself not to let the sourness seep into her face. Pleasant expression neutralizing her muscles, she let her eyes casually wander past Peter Barnes and his entourage.
Park picnics had become exercises in self-control. Denise loathed them, but she was damned if she was going to let Peter keep her from attending. Tables were scattered on the grass behind park headquarters. Two, shoved together, were loaded down with hamburger buns and condiments in the oversized squeeze bottles that always struck her as mildly obscene given the flatulent sounds that sputtered out with the ketchup, mustard, and, especially, the pickle relish.
Peter was sitting with his new wife, Lily.
Lily.
Could it get any worse? He couldn’t have married a Sheila or a Judy?
Or someone remotely his own age?
Like me, she thought again. Hatred burned like acid in the back of her throat. Peter was forty-six, four years older than she. Pretty little Lily had just turned thirty. Their baby, Olivia, was three months. Married fourteen months and a baby girl. Lucky, lucky Peter. Lucky Lily.
Three years had passed since Denise had been the one sitting next to Peter Barnes at the picnics. More. Thirty-eight months. Yet the wound had not healed. She still felt as if her skin had been peeled from her body, and her flesh, newly flayed, screamed silent and bloody for everyone to see.
For a time—months, maybe as long as a year—Denise had thought things were getting better. Then they started getting worse. Hate would roar like a lion, then tears would sting, but not fall. Thoughts of
them
flooded her mind in muddy rivers, bursting their banks. When the baby came, the flooding grew worse. Some days Denise could not escape endless tape-loops of images of that baby girl.
She hated Peter, hated Lily, though Lily hadn’t been the Other Woman, just the next woman. How could she not hate Lily? Lily was young and pretty. Lily had Denise’s life, Denise’s man, and just to make sure the knife was twisted, the baby Denise could never have.
Could never have because of Peter.
She realized her eyes had been stuck on the happy little family too long, on the baby. Lily was holding the baby, feeding it from a bottle. Lily never nursed. The little cow had no milk.
Lily caught her, smiling, happy, welcoming.
Denise forced a smile that probably didn’t work. Peter had undoubtedly told Lily about poor, old, pathetic Denise, the reject who had taken on the role of the ghost at the manor window, always present, never invited in.
Deciding she’d stayed long enough to prove she wasn’t broken-hearted, Denise stood and carried her Coke to the nearest trash bin. In an impotent act of defiance, she didn’t put the can in the recycle bin. Given that Peter had chosen to trash her life and recycle his own with the lovely, fertile Lily, she was damned if she would support his pet program.
Artie, the gung-ho new district ranger, sat at a table with one of the secretaries. Young and eager, he was trying to make being a park ranger more like being an Army Ranger, itching for black ops. Denise forced herself to smile at him.
After making it a point to saunter slowly from table to table saying her good-byes so it wouldn’t look like she was slinking away with her tail between her legs, Denise made it to her Miata. The last few steps she staggered like a drunk. What the hell was that about?
Holding on to the low door to keep from falling, she took deep breaths. Tremors rattled her bones. Almost as if Peter—his eyes, all the eyes—the baby, Lily, everybody knowing, had brought on some kind of seizure, as if around Peter and his postcard-perfect life she could no longer fill her lungs. Bony fingers of a monster hand wrapped around her rib cage, squeezing and squeezing.
Paranoia rampaged through her veins.
No. No monster. No seizures. Hyperventilation is all. Lily doesn’t know. They are fooled. I have them all fooled,
Denise told herself. For the most part she knew she was right. Certain people had a knack for seeing the ghost behind the eyes. Those people Denise avoided. The rest, when they bothered to think about her at all, believed she had moved on, that she was just as thrilled as they were with the assistant superintendent’s spiffy new family.
When she could do so without stumbling, Denise opened the car door and slid into the low bucket seat. A Mazda ragtop in northern Maine was a rich man’s summer toy, but a foolish purchase for a woman who could afford only one car. Denise had bought it a week after Peter announced he “needed space,” then promptly gave himself that space by throwing her out of the house they’d shared for eleven years.
Two months later he threw her out of his life.
At the time she bought the convertible she hoped it would make her feel free, sexy. For a brief moment it seemed to, then it didn’t, and she’d come to hate it. The list of things she was coming to hate lengthened daily, each new loathing attaching to the anchor that was Peter Barnes. The chain of hate had grown so heavy that some days Denise felt she couldn’t carry it another foot, that she would collapse under it and lie helpless until all vestiges of life were crushed from her body.
Before—as in before she was ruined and dumped—Denise used to enjoy the short drive on Route 233 to Bar Harbor. August, high summer, hot days and cool nights greened the park. The coast, with its islands like jeweled rock gardens scattering in a sea of whitecaps and blue water, took on a fairy-tale beauty.
Beauty was not yet on the list of things she hated, but she supposed it would come under the pall eventually.
Bar Harbor, draped in schmaltzy cuteness, was a place she’d used to avoid during tourist season. Alcohol, in its myriad forms, was another thing she’d once scorned. This evening, after suffering through another picnic with the royal family, she craved a place as fake as the promise of Happily Ever After, and a beer. Beers. One had ceased being enough long ago.
On the outskirts of town she pulled into the wide circular drive of the Acadian Lodge. In the 1940s and ’50s—the heyday of lodges and camps—the almost-wealthy summered at the Acadian, basking in the shadow of the truly moneyed.
There were cottages then. Denise had seen pictures of them—trim, freshly painted, lawns and gardens in careful rustic disarray, and “campers,” looking happy and coddled by armies of servants, mostly girls who’d come up from the cities by train to earn a little money and enjoy a summer by the sea.
No more.
The cabins had long since been torn down and the property sold off in half-acre lots. The lodge had grown as sad and tacky as a drunken old woman. Touches of new paint, sporadically and inexpertly applied, soaked like cheap drugstore makeup into the wrinkles and cracks of wood that had weathered too many winters.
In its glory days, the bar had been a fashionable watering hole. Now it was the haunt of locals, lobstermen mostly. It was dark and smelled faintly of the sea and dead fish. Stale cigarette smoke had permeated the walls and carpets so deeply that all these years after indoor smoking had been legislated into a crime, the smell persisted.
Usually Denise drank at home and alone. For reasons she didn’t understand—and didn’t want to—she was drawn to the Acadian when things in her mind got too ugly. Slipping into a dark wooden booth in a dark corner, she took off her sunglasses. The room was dominated by a once-elegant long bar backed by a mirror easily six feet high and fifteen feet long. Black age spots pocked the silvering around the edges, contributing to the sense that the place was diseased or moldering back into the stone and lichen upon which it was built.
The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Draft, dark,” Denise said, and then worked herself into the corner of the booth until the shadows closed around her. Other patrons had no business seeing memories ripping at her flesh, sharp-taloned and as vicious as harpies.
A couple of lobstermen on barstools were talking about the old guy who’d shot another old guy by the name of Will Whitman for robbing his traps and moving in on his territory. Yet another skirmish in the lobster wars that had been waged along these waters for generations and showed no sign of letting up. Law enforcement was worthless for the most part. Whose traps were where, and who ran which lines, was a mystery to everybody but the men who harvested lobsters for a living. They knew the bottom of the ocean around Maine as well as landlubbers knew the streets of their own neighborhoods.
Denise had heard that the dead man’s son, Walter, had been excommunicated from the fishing community because everybody figured his dad was guilty of robbing traps—sins of the father, acorns falling near trees, chips off the old block. She smiled to herself. The bozos knew nothing.
Lobsters disappeared, lobsters were never there in the first place, lobsters were poached. These jokers in their little boats on top of the water could only guess who or what happened right underneath them.
A young couple—tourists, lost or slumming—slid into a booth on the end wall. Both on the same side. The old Denise would have thought it romantic. This new Denise wanted to bite their heads off and spit them into their imported beers.
At the near end of the bar, where the wood curved gracefully toward the mirrored wall, a lone woman sat hunched over a glass. Bleached-blond hair formed a curtain between her and the lobstermen. Denise’s booth was on the opposite side of the ersatz veil, so she could see the blonde’s face. She was sporting a black eye and a split lip.
Revulsion swept through Denise in a sick-making wave. She couldn’t stand that the woman’s outside was a public image of her own insides: battered, abused, ashamed, and drinking alone.
Despite that, every few minutes, Denise’s gaze found its way back to the blonde on the barstool. Denise had been in law enforcement all of her adult life. A national park ranger, she’d seldom dealt with city-cop stuff. Parks were peaceful places for the most part, even in Acadia, where park and town and resort and sea came together in a patchwork of populations, each with its own agenda. Not once had she pulled her gun, used her baton or her pepper spray. What minimal compliance and self-defense training she’d gotten at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia had long since been forgotten.
Black eyes and split lips, though, were a form of violence she was familiar with. Family troubles don’t go away on vacation; they get worse. The damaged face wasn’t enough of a novelty to hold Denise’s interest, but something was. As she sneaked peeks over the rim of her first beer glass, her second, and then her third, she tried to figure out what was so fascinating.
It became evident that the battered blonde was known to the bartender. Maybe a regular. Denise hadn’t seen her here before, but then she never came to the Acadian this early in the evening. The lobstermen came here a lot. Usually, by the time Denise slunk in, they were three sheets to the wind. They might know the woman. Either the acquaintance was slight or they didn’t like her. Both pointedly refused to look in her direction. This suited Denise. If they didn’t look at the blond barfly, they couldn’t look at her.
There was something bizarrely familiar about the woman. Had she arrested her? No. that process was long and, in many ways, intimate. Denise would have remembered.
Acadia, for all it had a large and fluid population in the summer months, was a small town for year-round inhabitants. Had she seen the blonde in a grocery store or, given the face, a hospital emergency room? In her capacity as an EMT she had been to the ER at Mount Desert Island Hospital enough times with injured people.
The woman looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. The barstool made guessing her height tricky, but Denise figured she was about the same height as she was—five foot six—and probably weighed about the same, one hundred thirty pounds. Her face—without the obvious damage—was the kind that can be dressed up or down. Makeup and a good haircut and she’d be pretty. Without it, she was fairly ordinary. Still, there was something …
After a while the blonde began looking back. Their eyes met, and Denise stopped her furtive surveillance. The last thing she wanted was to get into a “what’re you lookin’ at?” bitchfest with a stranger.
Another beer, a trip to the ladies’ room.
The lobstermen got up and left. As they passed the blonde, working on her third drink since Denise arrived, one ducked his head and said, “Miz Duffy.” The other nodded politely.
Miz Duffy. No lobsterman Denise had run across would call a woman “Miss” unless she was their kid’s schoolteacher. Miz Duffy must be Mrs. Duffy. As Denise made her way unsteadily back to her booth, she wondered if they’d made a point of ignoring Mrs. Duffy because they didn’t think a married woman should be alone in a bar, or because they were acquainted with Mr. Duffy, and the fact that he’d beaten on his wife made social intercourse awkward.